Recollections of a Busy Life

BY far the most interesting parts of this book are the purely personal reminiscences, and for our own pleasure we would willingly have spared Mr. Greeley’s opinions of Poets and Poetry and Literature generally, and even of Protection and Divorce, if in the place of them we could have had more about his hard-worked boyhood and his struggling and indomitable manhood. Many of us differ upon the questions named, and some of us, we fear, do not care anything for them ; but as to the history of a man’s rise from poverty and obscurity to distinction and to a place of the greatest influence, there can be no doubt ; it is a perpetual romance ; it delights and touches all, for in this nation it is in some degree the story of every man’s life or the vision of his desires.

Most of us know already that Mr. Greeley was born in Londonderry, New Hampshire, of good Scotch-Irish stock ; but we had to learn from himself a great deal that was new and interesting about this ancestry. They were people of a religious creed as hard as the granite hills, whose sterility kept them industrious and poor ; but they had warm hearts, and their lives of heavy toil were lightened by seasons of fun as broad as their accent. It was a strictly Puritan community, such as should descend from the heroic Londonderry of the memorable siege. “And yet there was more humor, more play, more fun, more merriment in that Puritan community than can be found in this anxious, plodding age.” They celebrated their weddings by boisterous rejoicings with fire-arms, eating, drinking, and dancing ; they waked the dead, and drank the mourners poor, so that, as the author quaintly remarks, it was fortunate that they should have been so healthy as to have very few deaths among them. “ Houseraisings, corn-huskings, and all manner of excuses for merry-making, were frequent, and generally improved ; games requiring strength rather than skill, especially wrestling (with, I grieve to say, some boxing), were favorite pastimes.” Yet these frolickers were all stanch Calvinists, keepers of the Sabbath, patient church-goers, and faithful in family prayer and the reading of the Scriptures. They were honest and truthful, and, apart from their drinking, a most virtuous population. In the Revolution their good citizenship and patriotism were found of proof.

Mr. Greeley’s family were poor where none were rich, and his father seems to have been heir to rather more than his share of the family unthrift. He was a man of good natural powers and dauntless industry, but he had no gift for getting on ; and as long as he remained in New England, he was a tenant, and the needy tiller of alien acres, yet he was always hopeful and ruinously hospitable. The picture of the author’s early life is presented with a robust cheerfulness, but it is impossible not to feel its sadness, and there is something very tender and beautiful in the sketch of his mother, who was a woman of more than common aptitude and acquirements, and of capacity for better civilization than their time and station afforded. Her cheerful heart seemed to break when her husband removed to the backwoods of Pennsylvania. “ I think,” writes her son, “ the shadow of the great woods oppressed her from the hour she entered them ; and, though removed but two generations from pioneer ancestors, she was never reconciled to what the less roughly bred must always deem privations and hardships. I never caught the old smile on her face, the familiar gladness in her mood, the hearty joyfulness in her manner, from the day she entered these woods until that of her death, nearly thirty years later.” At the knees of this good mother her son learned to read, and in the fields, with his laborious, cheerful, luckless father, he learned the wisdom of hard work, which he insists upon in nearly all the didactic passages of his “ Recollections.” Yet he does not persuade us that he loved farming, or that it was profitable employment for a delicate boy who had a passion for books, and who, in his fourth year, could “spell down the class” between naps at the evening spelling-matches, when he “ could not keep his eyes open and should have been in bed.” Mr. Greeley believes now that the drudgery of the farm was irksome, because farming was then utterly unscientific; but it is doubtful whether any part of farming except its science is not drudgery, and whether his escape at the first opportunity to the more intellectual business of the printing-office was not the natural and inevitable result of the impulse diverting from hand-work every man capable of head-work. At any rate, it was this impulse which first interests the reader in him, and makes him ambitious for the boy, who early showed himself of a brave and true temper.

Poverty is a gloomy presence in any home, — even American poverty, — and a boy who saw the household goods distrained by the sheriff, and his father in flight from the debtors’ prison, no doubt found the morning of life dark enough ; and even when her time came, fortune presented herself to young Greeley masked and looking at the best like a very hard-favored virtue. When his father was about to quit New England, the printer’s apprentice walked over from the town where he was learning his trade to that where he was to take leave of his family. In words which must go to the hearts of all those who have known what homesickness is, and how very closely and tenderly common endurance and hardship knit parents and children together, he tells that some of his kindred urged him to go with the rest, and not return to his place in the printing-office. “ I was sorely tempted to comply,” he says, “but it would have been bad faith to do so.....A word from my mother, at the critical moment, might have overcome my resolution ; but she did not speak it..... After the parting was over, and I well on my way, I was strongly tempted to return ; and my walk back to Poultney (twelve miles) was one of the slowest and saddest of my life.”

Nothing could have been very difficult after this, and there seems to have been no other moment of the author’s life that asked so great fortitude and resolution. It was success ; but life is an artful romancer, and postpones its dénouements. There was a vast deal to go through before the destined greatness of the “Tribune” could be accomplished. How the apprentice became a journeyman printer in Western New York and in New York City, — then an editorial necessity of the politicians, employed and paid by them,—then the first independent and courageous journalist we have ever had, — is pretty well known to everybody ; but everybody may read it here with fresh pleasure, in that light and circumstance which a man can best give his own life. At every point the career is an interesting one, and in great part it includes national history.

Thanks to the peculiar constitution of his mind, which, while it lacks the qualities of originality or genius, is yet boldly tentative, he has been identified or connected with every social and political movement which has promised to benefit or elevate mankind; and he has something to tell us of them all. We think certain readers, who have learned rather from his enemies than from himself to regard him as a reckless innovator, will be surprised to find him so conservative as he is of all that really holds human society together for good,—marriage, the family, religion, subordination.

We have enjoyed Mr. Greeley’s reminiscences of his political contemporaries, which are as much descriptive of himself as of them. He seems not to have forgotten any of his likes or dislikes, and he is still a believer in his own statesmanship ; but his egotism where it appears is not offensive, and his treatment of old friends and old foes is alike temperate and sincere. The spirit of his sketch of Harry Clay is especially excellentit : is a cordial tribute to a man who is almost passing out of memory ; and what is said of Taylor, Calhoun, Webster, Buchanan, Weed, and Seward is of a value that will not decrease as we recede from the time when they were living interests.

It is apparent from these chapters that Mr. Greeley would have accepted higher place in political life than he ever received, and we think that his ambition was a just and honorable one. We own that our sympathies are with him in that dissolution of the partnership of Seward, Weed, and Greeley, famous some years ago ; we find his letter to Mr. Seward—it could not have been a pleasant letter to receive — a thoroughly manly and natural expression of proper feeling. On the other hand, his explanation of his part in the release of Jefferson Davis does not appear strong in anything but courage. It is a poor vindication of any act to say that those who were disposed to shirk their duty were glad of it. Negatively, however, we are all responsible for Davis’s escape from justice, and there are many far more guilty than Mr. Greeley. He scarcely rises to a full conception of Mr. Lincoln’s greatness, but it seems to us that he has clear and right ideas of the meanness with which the nation has treated Lincoln’s family.

The chapter on farming in this book is a characteristic one. The details are interesting, and the ingenuous confession at the end, that the profits are “ unspeakably small,” is in amusing discord with Mr. Greeley’s periodical advice through the Tribune to the hungry poor of the cities to go into the country and earn a living by a trade of which they know nothing. About literature, also, there are some very guileless criticisms, and some very good generalizations. We cannot believe that it is at all profitable, however, to warn people against a literary career. The literary life, like the married life, is something commonly embraced or shunned quite independently of the best or worst counsels.

We touch very sketchily upon a book which we have read with great pleasure, and which must take its rank with the very few good autobiographies in the lauguage.